Health Minutes

Health Minutes Navigation:

Obesity and surgery

It's commonly thought that the rate of complications after surgery is higher in people who are obese, but group of Swiss surgeons have debunked this as being, for the most part, a myth.

02 07 2003

Many surgeons hate operating on obese people. I remember one wit saying after making his abdominal incision on a particularly heavy person, “If my feet disappear please pull me out.”

They believe that obesity causes all sorts of complications from wound infections to blood clots.

But a group of Swiss surgeons have tested this by following over 6000 people undergoing non-emergency abdominal operations.

There was no doubt that the fatter a person was, the more likely he or she was to have heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes and it did seem from the statistics that thinner people were more likely to have an operation in the first place. Surgeons also preferred keyhole surgery on obese patients.

Yet allowing for these differences, the only complications which were greater in obese people were wound infections – and only in people having a large abdominal incision. There were no differences when laparoscopic or keyhole surgery was performed. The surgery itself didn’t take significantly longer either in fatter people.

The factors which counted for complications regardless of body size were how major the surgery was and whether or not the abdomen needed to be opened.

The conclusions were that obese people shouldn’t be denied operations if they need them or forced to lose weight but that laparoscopic surgery should be carried out whenever possible.